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Danny's Car Wash owner gets no deferred prosecution

"Danny's Car Wash didn't play by the rules," a prosecutor said during Danny Hendon's sentencing.

This, on the day the rules were changing.

Hendon, 64, was sentenced to a year in prison, a year of home detention and he was ordered to forfeit $156,000 seized from his now-former business. In July, Hendon admitted to conspiracy to commit identity theft, for his role in hiring workers who are in the country illegally.

His sentencing ends one of the largest federal work-site enforcement cases in Arizona – one that should discourage other employers from hiring workers who are in the country illegally.

And it came on a day when many undocumented immigrants were given what amounts to a pass, for now. On Friday, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that'll allow up to five million undocumented immigrants to gain temporary legal status and work permits.

Presumably, some of those five million might have worked at Danny's.

The case against Hendon started four years ago, after Homeland Security investigators received four tips that Danny's Family Car Wash was hiring undocumented workers. An audit in 2011 disclosed that 942 of his 1,900 employees were likely here illegally.

Danny's notified ICE that the company was terminating the illegal workers. But when the replacements proved too expensive or poor workers, prosecutors say he pressured his general managers to get the undocumented workers back on the payroll and spare him the details of how it happened.

After company managers were indicted – some of whom prosecutors say actually supplied the stolen identities that would allow the fired employees to clear E-Verify – Hendon had the nerve to fire many of them, including the ones he strong armed into breaking the law.

Nice.

In addition to Hendon, 14 Danny's managers admitted their role in hiring undocumented workers. Most got a few months behind bars. Thirty other employees were taken into custody for immigration violations -- people who had either been previously deported or convicted of crimes that landed them on ICE's priority list for enforcement.

An additional 179 were released with no plans to take action against them.

Hendon's attorney, Lee Stein, wrote in court documents that Hendon just wanted a reliable workforce. After the audit and mass firing, Danny's tried to find new employees to replace the undocumented workers, Stein wrote. They went to job fairs and halfway houses and even contracted to bring in workers from Jamaica for a time.

"The replacement workers were just not as good of employees as the workers who were terminated," Stein wrote. "Worried about the future of the business he had spent 30 years building, Danny raised the idea with his two senior managers, Jack Edlund and John Randal Sanford, of bringing back the terminated employees."

And the rest, as they say, is history.

The Danny's raid provided a glimpse into an ugly underworld that's a byproduct of our leaders' inability to control our borders and develop a workable immigration system.

One that our esteemed leaders in Congress sorely need to understand.

Hendon, who lost his business and now has Parkinson's, will have to report in prison in January. Meanwhile, many of his former employees will be able to apply for Obama's deferral program, assuming they can pass a background check.

While I'm not feeling overly sorry for Hendon – he's one of the few employers forced to pay a penalty for illegal hiring – there are a couple of things worth noting here.

1 Hendon was a successful businessman, a former Detroit police officer who was well thought of in the community for his good works, including raising funds for the families of fallen officers. Yet he felt called to ignore the nation's immgiration laws. According to court documents, he instructed his reluctant top managers to "get the Mexicans back" because his new American workers had increased his labor costs while doing a poorer job than his old crew, with customers too often left waiting for service.

2.The vast majority of the undocumented workers he hired just wanted a job. They weren't looking for a handout. They weren't trying to collect unemployment or welfare or Obamacare. They just wanted to put in a good day's work for something that I'm guessing was less than a good day's pay.

3.Despite the use of stolen identities, not a single person came forward to claim they were harmed. Not one.

"The United States made extensive efforts to notify the potential victims of the identity-theft scheme, no victim has reported suffering a tangible financial loss that would give rise to restitution," prosecutors wrote.

The workers, it seems, were only seeking to clean out cars -- not anybody's bank account.

Something for our leaders – Republicans in particular -- to think about as they ponder what to do about this mess we call an immigration policy.